I arrived to Buenos Aires from Santiago de Chile early in the
morning with very little sleep. But turns out that even if
American Airlines and Lan Chile are partners of the One World
alliance, American Airlines forces you to go through
immigration and customs even if you are a passenger in
transit.

Forms had to be filled, immigration cleared, and customs
cleared. Only to find out that I lost my airplane by five
minutes. Thank you American Airlines.

Loosing this plane was particularly annoying, because there
are no more flights from the Buenos Aires international
airport to Montevideo that day. I had to go to the Aeroparque
airport (40 minutes away) to catch a different airplane.

Cultural note: when you make changes to your airline tickets,
airlines feel the need to charge you a hundred dollars for the
change. This is a pressing need that they can not avoid, but
when it is the airlines fault (like, say, this time), they do
not reimburse you anything, or give you a hundred dollars.

Of course the employees that you deal with are not the ones to
blame for the company policies, but I wish I was not
completely at mercy of the airlines will. Worth reading:
`Plane Insanity'.

If I had known that I would be for so long in Buenos Aires, I
would have set something up with the local users group.

The one good thing about missing the airplane was a small
restaurant in the airport that was cooking `Lomitos' in
the airport. I ordered a `Lomito Completo' which is a
sandwitch with two steaks of Lomito, ham, cheese, and a
egg on top with french fries on the side.

It is not only the best food I ever had in an airport,
but one of the most delicious sandwitches ever.

I could not believe an airport could have such delicious
food. The restaurant also had wine, which I did not want to
have to avoid further dehydration.

Uruguay

Rodolfo and Haroldo picked me up at the Carrasco airport
in Montevideo, Uruguay. I was at this point completely
exhausted by the lack of sleep from the trip from Lima.

I had a meeting with the founders of a company called Genexus and I got to see
their product.

They produce software to ease the development of database
applications. A developer only defines the schema of the
database, and hooks up the rules, the user interface and the
reports they want. What is particularly interesting about
this tool, its that it provides an evolution path to evolve
the databases: as you make changes and introduce new
relationships the software moves the information from the
existing tables to new tables and creates and populates them
for you.

The software is a multi-plaform software, it is not free
software, but it is genuinely interesting.

Talk

I did a presentation of GNOME 2 in the University in Uruguay
shortly after the previous meeting, this was in what used to
be an old church inside a convent. The talk was well
attended and we discussed issues of free software, Gnome, and
Mono. If people are interested in my OpenOffice slides, I can
mail those.

I got to meet my
friend Pablo that I have met a few times at previous Usenix
events.

After the talk, a group of people went for dinner to a
vegetarian restaurant. But being in Uruguay and eating
vegetarian food was not ideal, so we split off and went
to eat some traditional food from Uruguay. This
picture was taken late that night.